Drinking holds back poor countries: study
Washington (AP) 7/8/91

To the list of familiar reasons for the slow growth and social problems of poor countries can be added an often ignored but potent accomplice - alcohol.

Having a cold beer after a hard day's work seems like an innocuous habit in many parts of the world, but what happens in a country where the wages are meager and just two bottles of beer cost half a day's pay?

The result is that many households have no money left over for necessities such as food, and children must go to bed hungry. According to one estimate, one-third of the malnourished children of San Pedro La Laguna, Guatemala, are victims of booze.

In Burkina Faso, formerly Upper Volta, a study of men in one region showed that they spent an average of $84 a year on beer - 44% of the West African country's per capita income, a diversion of scarce resources that has contributed greatly to the impoverishment of that area.

The same is true of Papua New Guinea, where it is estimated that the average household spends 30% of its income on alcohol.

Generally speaking, in countries where drinking is a problem, it is the men who imbibe and the women and children who pay the price.

The consequences of alcohol consumption in poor countries are examined by Lori Heise in the July/August issue of Worldwatch magazine, published by the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington research center.

She concludes that drinking retards growth in poor countries no less than more familiar culprits such as inflation, foreign debt and economic mismanagement. Not surprisingly, unrestrained drinking makes things worse.

"Excessive alcohol use is more than just a health issue in the Third World, it is a development issue," Heise writes. "Where severe, drinking lowers productivity, reduces agricultural output and undermines progress toward improved health for women and children."

She points out that treatment of alcohol-related diseases forces hard pressed governments to divert resources from other vital needs. In Mexico, for example, cirrhosis of the liver - a disease closely associated with heavy drinking - is the leading cause of death among men 25-54. In Trinidad, 47% of males admitted to the country's largest hospital have medical problems related to drinking.

Drinking is becoming an increasingly accepted pastime in the Third World, partly because sophisticated advertising campaigns establish close links between alcohol and social status, analysts say. Some companies best known for tobacco products, including Philip Morris and R. J. Reynolds, also are among the world's top alcohol producers.

"Buying up alcoholic beverage firms was strategic for the large tobacco conglomerates," says John Cavanaugh, who did a study on the subject for the World Health Organization.

"Now they can apply the well-tested expertise they've developed marketing one addictive product, tobacco, to the promotion of another-alcohol."

Spokesmen for the alcoholic beverage industry did not return telephone calls seeking comment.